I should also add that I will shortly send patches for the kvm tool
required to drive this VM as well as a small set of patches that
create a para-virtualized MIPS/Linux guest kernel.
The idea is that because there is no standard SMP linux system, we
create a standard para-virtualized system that uses a handful of
hypercalls, but mostly just uses virtio devices. It has no emulated
real hardware (no 8250 UART, no emulated legacy anything...)

Virtualization is useful for running legacy code. Why dismiss support
for non pv guests so easily?

Just because we create standard PV system devices, doesn't preclude
emulating real hardware. In fact Sanjay Lal's work includes QEMU
support for doing just this for a MIPS malta board. I just wanted a
very simple system I could implement with the kvm tool in a couple of
days, so that is what I initially did.

The problem is that almost nobody has real malta boards, they are really
only of interest because QEMU implements a virtual malta board.

Personally, I see the most interesting us cases of MIPS KVM being a
deployment platform for new services, so legacy support is not so
important to me. That doesn't mean that other people wouldn't want some
sort of legacy support. The problem with 'legacy' on MIPS is that there
are hundreds of legacies to choose from (Old SGI and DEC hardware,
various network hardware from many different vendors, etc.). Which
would you choose?

Come to think of it, Emulating SGI hardware might be an interesting
case. There may be old IRIX systems and applications that could be
running low on real hardware. Some of those systems take up a whole
room and draw a lot of power. They might run faster and at much lower
power consumption on a modern 48-Way SMP SoC based system.